


This Hospital The Titanic, My Heart Drowns

by Zagzagael



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-13
Updated: 2013-04-13
Packaged: 2017-12-08 09:52:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/760014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Season Two finale. Fanfiction helps us deal with the why why why of canon....</p><p>Written for a prompt at livejournal's prompt_critical writing community. Prompt:  Flower Buds – pepper, cream, titanic, lure, smash</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Hospital The Titanic, My Heart Drowns

She stood, frozen. His corpse the iceberg upon which her heart was wrecking. Destroyed. Dying, he tore her heart open. Love like blood gouting, pouring out, filling her body, capsizing, leaving her empty. 

Her hands came up instinctively, protecting her face, as though his death was a physical relentless blow. Warding. Her eyes closed, her mouth open, the silent screaming of grief beyond words. Not contained. 

Breathless and broken. And sinking below the iced surface of everything she’d ever dreamed of, everything she’d ever hoped for from him, from life, from love. Falling, the body off the capsizing bridge and bow. She tumbled her body beside his and for the first time in her life she longed for death. She wanted to follow him down into the depths. The cold darkness. Her head covered, her life sucked into the blackness below. 

The wealthy and the indigent. Sailing through life and death. This darkness calls you all. We sink.

He could not hold her she could not follow. Beside him, she pulled the last of the warmth out of his body and into her skin, her fingertips, her open palms on his flesh. She would remember him warm. The cream of his flesh mottling and his blood curdling.

She the healer could not heal. He the dying could not live. She was his Angel of Death now and she lay her head on his shoulder and let her tears run into the bend of his throat.

DNR. His name, his scrawl, his mark, the ink dried and brittle, the paper wet and smeared. Do. Not. Do not. Do do do. Not.

Motherless child, childless mother. Shipless captain, captainless ship. 

On the table, a still life. The art form of death. On the floor of the theatre, so much blood it could be mopped and bucketed. Wiped and staining. 

She had brought this on him, visited death upon him. She descended, wings beating, give me your soul, here here here. She ascended. Wings the sound of being slapped again and again and again. Beating, beating, your heart is not beating. Not beating. Beating. 

Flatline. DNR. Rage against the machine.

He had become the specter of death and she loved him, loved him in that guise because she was the one who had re-clothed him. Had she lured him or had he lured her to this smashing end. She did not know. Could not answer. Their two hearts had called one another in secret voices, but the heart that had spoken her name was gone, replaced with new. Where was that heart now? The transplant team had cut out the heart that she had loved.

Below her, the wreck on the floor below her, she closed her eyes and reached out with her mind. Her hands flat and fast on his still chest.

Burke in despair, his hand trembling, his dreams tremoring out of his body. 

Meredith in ecstasy, yes yes yes. Singing the body glorious. Alive and entangled.

Derek in agony, the throes of his obsession with this life. This body. This brain. He kissed her so hard, so wildly, so in need that he lost his breath for just that moment, stopped breathing and felt his heart rise up in protest.

Cristina in confusion. Her personality pepper, sharp, painful. The edges of herself hurting him but she was what was needed. 

George in aggrieved kindness. He the reluctant gladiator of friendship, the fierce and the loyal. Stop fighting me. Let me love you. All of you. 

And Alex, his arms strong, his hold fast. He would not let go, fingers tattooed like generations of sailors behind him. Hold. Fast. Lash yourself and guide us through. You will be soaked with the endless salt of tears. It will dry your skin. It will preserve you.

He lifted her from the dead man’s arms, from her lover’s tangled wires. He held her to him, carried her away from the rising wave of grief, the ocean of sadness, sat and cradled her. His words nonsense, soothing, soothing, soothing. She cried in his arms, he was alive. 

On and on the ship sailed and sunk and surfaced and sailed still waters, sunk and surfaced and fought stormy seas and weathered and sailed. And in the space of two hours’ time fifteen hundred lives were lost, in the span of two months’ time fifteen hundred lives were spared. Saved. Healed. 

You healed me I could not heal you.

Still and lifeless. The sun setting on the horizon of his life. She said goodbye goodbye. She knew that in his dreaming he would see her again. But that was a stretch of time immeasurable. She was broken, on the sea floor. There was no one in her nightmare. Alone. Torn. Wrecked. Diminished from greatness.

On the table beside the bed, a make-shift mason jar vase, a scrap of paper, in her girlish handwriting - _you came through_. Roses from the garden behind the house, in bud, unopened.


End file.
